Slideshow
Q&A with RIOTSVILLE, U.S.A. Director Sierra Pettengill, Writer Tobi Haslett
& Badges Without Borders Author
Stuart Schrader
Sunday, September 18
2:45
Sierra Pettengill’s work focuses on the warped narratives of the American past. Most recently, she directed the archival short The Rifleman, which premiered at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival. Her 2017 feature-length film, the all-archival documentary THE REAGAN SHOW, premiered at the Locarno Film Festival before airing on CNN. She directed the ‘Big Dan’s Tavern’ episode of the Netflix series Trial By Media about the first televised rape trial in the U.S. Her 2018 all-archival short film, Graven Image, aired on POV and is held at the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama. In 2013 she produced the Academy Award-nominated film CUTIE & THE BOXER, which also won an Emmy Award for Best Documentary, and co-directed (with Jamila Wignot) TOWN HALL, about the emergent Tea Party movement, for PBS. She has also worked as an archival researcher for many artists including Jim Jarmusch and Adam Pendleton. She was a Sundance Institute Art of Nonfiction Fellow, a fellow at the Yaddo and MacDowell colonies, and is a board member of Screen Slate.
Tobi Haslett is a writer who has written about art, film, literature and politics for The New Yorker, Artforum, Harper's, and elsewhere. He penned the introduction to Horse Crazy (1989), a novel by Gary Indiana reissued in 2018, and Nothing But the Music, a collection of poems by Thulani Davis forthcoming from Blank Forms in 2020. Tobi’s essays have appeared in the exhibition catalogues for Radical Visions: Reza Abdoh (MoMA PS1, 2018) and Martin Puryear's U.S. Pavilion exhibition at the 59th Venice Biennale. He lives in New York.
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Stuart Schrader is a scholar of policing, empire, war, and radical movements to challenge them. He is the author of Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing, published in 2019. Schrader is currently at work on a new book about the rise of the police as unique political actors in the United States, examining the history of police unionism after the Civil Rights Movement. His articles have been published widely, in Artforum, The Baffler, Harvard Design Magazine, n+1, The Nation, The Washington Post, and many other venues.
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